Dana Milbank: So much for Obama changing Washington

As for celebrity, Obama advisers were feted at 14 galas during the first inauguration. Haddad threw parties for the son of the first lady’s chief of staff as well as David Axelrod’s assistant and Rahm Emanuel’s lieutenant. She suggested to Axelrod’s wife, Susan, that in exchange for Susan co-hosting Haddad’s annual celebrity brunch, “Tammy would devote the following year to helping her campaign to promote awareness about epilepsy,” which afflicts the Axelrods’ daughter.

Haddad became the Axelrod charity’s “woman of the year,” and she used her connections to help Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, a client, score an interview of Obama and an Air Force One ride for both of them.

The accommodations to Washington business-as-usual went on. “One high-level official on the re-election campaign said it felt like, at a certain point, people were thinking mostly about who would play them in the 2012 version of ‘Game Change,’” Leibovich writes. Gibbs told Leibovich about a soul-searching meeting of Obama aides. “I remember saying in that meeting, ‘Somehow we have all changed,’” Gibbs said. “Or maybe Washington just changed us.”

That makes “This Town” worthwhile — even if you don’t care what happened at the Bar Mitzvah of David Brooks’ son, or that the wedding cake for Ed Henry of Fox News was a 70-pound replica of the White House.